The brainfart factory

I have a beef with the notion of ownership. To put it bluntly, organised religions each own a carefully segmented brand of god, and I think this is the very definition of evil. Their practitioners treat the one god worthy of the capital letter like a brand of beer. And if he is not good enough for the market, they spin a new image. They even have the audacity to attach gender to this entity. Can any notion of god really have cojones? Dare we even use a capital G? Then they scare six kinds of shit out of you with the bad guy. Who is by definition, anything that does not fit their brand. And worst of all, to own it is to be owned by it. Slaves to a brand. Prisoners…..

Now in the beginning, according to one family of religious brands, poor Eve attracts the wrath of god from eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In doing this, she commits all her daughters to second class citizenship for eternity and gets humanity branded as fundamentally evil. Where was Adam? Or was the author just male? Quite a guilt trip! What Eve “took” was not knowledge. What was taken was the ownership of this knowledge. And this stolen knowledge was placed on hard won parchment, collected and carried through millennia. Fought for, evangelised, repackaged, spin doctored, blindly followed or just plain warped. And then presented as “fact” in the fractured array of religious offerings we see today. Owned! That very knowledge of good and evil is now used to judge those who do not subscribe to a particular brand! To quote Sam Harris: “Satan himself could not have come up with a more diabolical scheme!”. Me being an atheist and all, I am prepared to hazard a guess that the underlying god of any particular religion is perhaps a little too grand to have his/her/its word contained in a volume that is easily portable to a child!

The raw irony here is that any attempt to own such knowledge is profoundly stupid. Own it, and it owns you. Own it, and you loose it. Owning it is to contain it. Own it, and suddenly there is right and wrong: black and white in a rainbow coloured world. And by definition, you cannot contain God.

I am truly inspired by the intellectual depths of people like Ralph Emerson. These real humans show us the majesty that is the human soul, our very being, and often with a strong theist view point. True, universal and deeply human values, with explicit lack of ownership. These values resonate in us because they are us and defy ownership. Even under the most appalling conditions, the human soul remains unownable.

So, an invitation to god’s brand faithful: Let go of your burden and soar in what you truely are. Perhaps then, you can use a capital G.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Ranting again. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.